Dancing Backward In Paradise by Vera Jane Cook is a brilliant debut novel that explores the definition of happiness and tries to make sense of the unexpected turns on life's highway. Grace Place is nineteen-years-old and lives in the Paradise Trailer Park in Hixon, Tennessee. The year is 1966 and Grace is content exploring the back roads, swimming in the cold waters of Tennessee and dancing in the wind. When her life is thrown off track by a man named Lenny Bean, Grace becomes entwined in a medley of lies, murder and betrayal.